Tutorial: After Effects: Tips for Faking a Pixel Art Look

Award winning motion graphics designer Garth Lee shares some tips on creating the look of pixel art. Think video games from the 80’s and 90’s.

Here's an excerpt from Garth Lee's post:

When creating low resolution assets for an 8 or 16-bit style animation, the goal is to achieve clear, crisp pixel art, and there are well known settings to do this easily. Changing the way After Effects scales your assets is important, and there are 3 options to choose from, Bilinear, Bicubic and Draft Sampling. Without going into too much detail, for pixel art, under the 'quality and scaling' toggle, you need to select Draft. This ensures that After Effects won't try any fancy upscaling techniques to smooth out your artwork, keeping everything crisp and clear...

...I created a music video a few years back that would have benefitted from knowing about this setting when rendering in a pixel art style. It was based on classic video games such as Super Mario, Streets of Rage, and Out Run, but looking back on it now, I can see that it hadn't rendered as sharp as it could have.

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